Popular Solutions

Automatically Send Invoices for Deals in ActiveCampaign November 20, 2018

With a tool like ActiveCampaign, you can easily track your leads, manage your contacts, and close deals. Add WebMerge to your sales process and you can automatically populate all your sales documents like contracts, quotes, proposals, and more with the click of a button!

In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically populate an invoice and send it to the customer for payment when we update the stage of a deal to Send Invoice. The sales person doesn’t have to hunt for a template or send to AR for processing—it all happens automatically.

To get started, we’re going to set up our invoice template using a Word document. Inside Word, we’re going to set up the repeating information for our invoice, like our logo, address, line items, etc. Then for the spots where we want to insert our deal/customer information, we’re going to use merge fields like {$CustomerName}, {$Email}, {$Amount}, etc.

Here’s what our invoice template looks like:

Once we have our template finished, we need to upload it to WebMerge. From the Documents page in WebMerge, click the New Document button and enter a name. On the next step, choose Office Document as the document type and then select the file from your computer.

After you’ve uploaded your template, you’ll be taken to the Settings page, where you can modify various options like the type of file that is generated and the name of the file. For this example, we’re going to produce a PDF document and include the name of the deal in our file name.

We’re also going to turn on Debug Mode at the bottom of the page by clicking Test Mode then checking the box to save data for 24 hours.

The last thing we’re going to turn on is our Field Map under Advanced Settings on the right side of the page. We’ll use this to connect the ActiveCampaign fields with our merge fields.

Next, we’re going to set up the delivery of our document so that it is automatically emailed directly to our customer. Under the Deliver tab, click Edit for your default email delivery. For the “To” address we’re going to choose the merge field for our customer’s email address.

If you don’t have a merge field in your template for the email address, choose <<other>> from the dropdown, then enter something like {$Email} in the box.

Feel free to customize any of the other email settings as well.

Once you have saved your email delivery, we are done with the setup process inside WebMerge, and we’re ready to integrate with ActiveCampaign. But first, we need to grab the Merge URL for our document, which can be found under the Merge tab.

We’ll use this Merge URL inside ActiveCampaign, so copy it for now.

Inside ActiveCampaign, we’re going to go to the Automations page, and we’ll set up a new automation that is triggered based on the stage of a deal being changed. We have a stage setup called “Send Invoice” that we’ll use.

Next, we’re going to add an Action to our automation, and we’ll select Webhook as the action. For the URL, we’re going to paste in the Merge URL for our document.

Once you have your webhook set up, go ahead and save your automation. We’re ready for a test! Open one of your deals and change the status to “Send Invoice.” Then if you go back to WebMerge and go to the Overview tab of your document, you’ll see a View Data button.

Click the View Data button, and you’ll see the data WebMerge is receiving from ActiveCampaign. If you click on each field, you can see the merge field that you need to use in the Field Map.

Inside your Field Map, you need to insert the field code from the View Data pop-up that matches up with your merge field in your document. This tells the system which fields to populate in your template.

Note: The Field Map is optional. You can also change the merge fields in your template to match the fields coming over from ActiveCampaign.

Once you have saved your Field Map, we’re ready for another test to make sure everything is working! Here’s what our populated invoice looked like ready for the customer:

Congrats, you’re all done! You can now instantly populate all kinds of documents from ActiveCampaign. Can you think of any other ways that you could use WebMerge to simplify your paperwork processes?